Early the next morning, Kate was sitting at the breakfast table when the sound of a Howler erupted from the Gryffindor table behind her.
The gist of it was Mrs. Weasley sharing her heartfelt thoughts on her sons stealing a flying car to get to school.
Quite vivid. It nearly brought the ceiling down.
Once the Howler had finished its performance, the Prefects finally got around to distributing the timetables.
Good. Slytherin's first class of the new term was Charms with Ravenclaw, while Gryffindor had Herbology with Hufflepuff.
On her way out of the Great Hall, Kate caught Hermione mouthing "see you after class" across the room.
She didn't need three guesses to figure out what that conversation would be about.
The first Charms lesson ran for an hour and a half, letting out just before ten o'clock.
The moment Kate had earned Slytherin its first five points, she made her escape.
She'd already noticed during class that Malfoy had started giving her those strange looks again.
She waited near the castle entrance for a few minutes, and sure enough, the Gryffindor trio came trooping over from the direction of the greenhouses, just as their class ended.
"Look at the state of you two gentlemen — covered in mud and looking thoroughly chastened. Sounds like the professors gave you a proper earful yesterday," she remarked, then idly flicked her wand and cleaned the dirt off all three of them in one sweep.
"Transfiguration's next — walk and talk." She said it perfectly calmly, already taking Hermione by the hand as she set off.
For the rest of the walk, she listened as the three of them filled in everything that had happened the day before, passing the story back and forth between them.
After being locked out at the barrier at King's Cross, the two boys had taken it upon themselves to steal a flying car and make the journey to Hogwarts on their own — only to get thrashed out of the sky by a Whomping Willow partway through, and barely making it into the school after that.
They had arrived at Hogwarts, but were promptly subjected to a relay of interrogations by Snape, Dumbledore, and McGonagall in turn, and ended up with detentions to show for it.
Dreadful. And entirely deserved.
Any reasonably functional adult could see how dangerous it was to send two underage children flying a magical car all the way from a train station to Hogwarts.
No wonder even Dumbledore had apparently turned stern in Harry's telling of it. As one of the most celebrated educators of his age, Old Man Dumbledore's face before students was almost invariably warm and grandfatherly.
This particular piece of recklessness had presumably caught even the calculating White Dark Lord off guard — yet even so, he would have had to make sure the two of them didn't suffer any disproportionately severe punishment for it.
Kate suspected Dumbledore had lost a fair few hairs over it yesterday.
"The professors were furious, Mrs. Weasley sent a Howler — honestly, you two." She said it as they found seats near the front of the classroom.
There were still five minutes before class. Students were beginning to filter in and fill the room around them.
Ron slumped into the row behind her, looking miserable. "Easy for you to say — we've still got detentions to serve."
"Want me to share some tips? I've racked up more detentions than the two of you combined last year. I've basically got a curriculum at this point."
"...No thank you." Harry propped his head on one hand and declined with weary resignation.
Class began shortly after. When Professor McGonagall walked in, she made a point of looking directly at the two boys, the disappointment in her eyes barely contained.
Today's lesson was transfiguring beetles into buttons. Kate earned Slytherin another five points, as expected.
She noticed the gaze from Malfoy's corner of the classroom had grown more conspicuous again.
What was that girl's problem — why did she keep staring?
It wasn't as though Kate had done anything to provoke her recently.
Kate was thoroughly baffled, but the moment she turned her head to meet Malfoy's eyes, Malfoy looked away with an expression of perfect indifference.
That very deliberate act of ignoring her only deepened Kate's bewilderment.
Not that she had the time to puzzle out whatever Malfoy's little game was.
When class finally ended, Kate declined Hermione's invitation to head to the Great Hall for lunch and made her way up to the Headmaster's office on the eighth floor alone.
That morning, when she'd gone to check the diary, she'd found it in a state she hadn't expected — the cover had cracked and scorched, as though it had been held over a flame.
She'd immediately run every diagnostic charm she knew over it and found nothing.
Her original plan had been to watch the situation and hand it over to Old Man Dumbledore at a convenient moment, but now that the diary had developed an anomaly she couldn't explain, she had no choice but to get rid of it early.
"Lemon Sherbet!" She gave the password to the gargoyle, and stepped briskly onto the revolving staircase.
She walked quickly to the office door, hesitated a moment over the box in her hands, then raised her fist and knocked.
"Professor? May I come in?"
After a short pause, the door swung open. Dumbledore was seated behind his desk, and looked up at her with mild surprise. "Kate — is there something you'd like to speak with me about?"
"Yes, Professor." Kate walked straight in and set the box down on the desk in front of him. "This is something I came across recently, by accident."
She opened the box, revealing the scorched surface of the diary. "Before you open it, please allow me to explain where it came from — and why I've decided to bring it to you."
She knew perfectly well that even if she didn't volunteer the information, Dumbledore would ask. Better to get ahead of it and save everyone the trouble.
Dumbledore's bright blue eyes regarded her with gentle patience. "Please, go on. I'm listening."
"Where to begin..." Kate considered for a moment, then decided to start from the beginning. "You'll remember, Professor, the Ministry's mass raids on dark artefacts over the summer?"
Of course he would.
There was a flicker of something peculiar in Dumbledore's expression — if not for that incident, Kate would never have come to find him over the summer holidays, and certainly wouldn't have 'accidentally' nearly blown several walls off his office.
Kate then gave a slightly edited account of how she had come to acquire the diary.
The edited version went as follows: she had not set out to take it. She had been at the bookshop while the Weasley family was paying for their things, and had noticed the diary tucked between some textbooks — apparently left by someone.
In the spirit of returning lost property, she had meant to find its owner. But when she'd opened it, there wasn't a single word inside.
So she had taken it home, found a box, and put it away.
Before long, she noticed what appeared to be scorch marks — as though it had been burned at some point — and realising something was off, she had tried writing in it.
"And then... I watched my own handwriting disappear, and a new line appeared in its place."
She swallowed with some difficulty, her fingers trembling slightly as she lifted the diary from the box.
"It said that its owner's name was Tom Riddle."
The warmth in Dumbledore's expression vanished in an instant.
Kate pretended not to notice the shift, and kept her voice unsteady as she continued her half-true, half-fabricated story.
"I didn't know who this Riddle was, so I looked into it. And then I found out... found out that he was the one who.."
Her face had gone ashen. Her lips had begun to tremble almost imperceptibly.
"He was the one who killed my entire family..."
"That's enough, child."
Dumbledore rose from his chair in an instant and appeared behind her, wrapping her in a gentle embrace. "If you can't say it," he said softly, "you don't have to."
"I'm sorry, Professor — I think I'm losing control a little." Kate turned and buried her face in his robes, her body still shaking faintly.
Without an adult's soul to hold things together, a thirteen-year-old girl who had watched her entire family be murdered — this kind of reaction was, in truth, nothing out of the ordinary.
As for the events at the end of first year — in the strictest technical sense, she had not faced Voldemort's remnant soul herself.
"There's nothing to apologise for," Dumbledore continued to soothe her. "None of this is your fault."
It took a while before Kate gradually steadied herself. She looked down, wiped her eyes, and stepped back, her gaze moving once more to the diary on the desk — her expression deeply conflicted.
"I didn't speak with it again. But I thought — if it's a diary left behind by Voldemort, it's probably dangerous to people. So after a long while of deliberation, I finally brought it here."
In actual fact, she had spotted the anomaly and was simply trying to pass it off quickly. But even offloading it required a decent cover story — if it gave Old Man Dumbledore reason to be suspicious of her, that would be far more trouble than it was worth.
Dumbledore looked at her with something like admiring relief. "To notice something was wrong and still think clearly — and to bring it to me rather than act on your own. You've done very well."
He drew his wand carefully and ran several detection spells over the diary, but none of them returned anything unusual. He frowned slightly.
Seeing this, Kate hastily offered him a nudge in the right direction. "This diary seems to have a kind of independent consciousness. Do you think it could be a magical object like the Sorting Hat?"
The Sorting Hat, nearby on its shelf, perked up its battered form at once and issued a loud denial. "No! How dare you compare something as wicked as that to me!"
Wicked?
Dumbledore cast a thoughtful glance at the Sorting Hat, then turned back to Kate and explained gently, "The Sorting Hat acquired its awareness because the four founders of Hogwarts poured their own thoughts into it — it's quite different from an ordinary enchanted object."
In other words, ordinary magical objects couldn't speak and think the way the Sorting Hat could.
Kate was playing the part of a perfectly ordinary little girl at this point — she scratched her head with a hint of embarrassment, walked over to the Sorting Hat, tilted her head back, and apologised up at it.
"Sorry — I had it wrong."
Mollified, the Sorting Hat stretched its great mouth wide open, looking as though it was about to burst into song — only for Dumbledore to hit it with a Silencing Charm before it could start.
"I don't think either of us is in the mood for a song just now." Dumbledore gave her a small wink.
He had, in fact, already formed a fairly good idea of what this diary was. But with Kate standing right there, it was hardly the moment to say it aloud.
The concept of a Horcrux — something so darkly evil — was perhaps not something a young girl ought to know about.
But then...
He looked again at the child before him: head bowed, shoulders drawn in, looking small and hunched in a way that seemed entirely unfeigned from any angle.
Perhaps this was the moment to begin — carefully, gradually — letting her come to understand his thinking on her own?
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